It's Strawberry Season

While there are plenty of slick graphics on websites that tell us what’s in season at our local farmers market I continue to associate ripe fresh foods with events as opposed to dates. Every year I would look forward to my dad’s birthday in mid-June because it meant the height of strawberry season. At some point our family would go berry-picking, crawling around on our hands and knees with sturdy cardboard boxes. Some places were old school with short-legged wooden carrying baskets which held six or eight quart boxes—not the press paper green boxes we use today, but ones constructed of split-wood often juiced-stained with years of use.Some relatives put in their own berry patches paying the kids to pick for paying customers who didn’t want to (or couldn’t) pick for themselves. Others would simply share their bounty among family and friends with someone making homemade ice cream, others shortcake and my personal favorite—grandma’s sponge cake with a texture that would soak up cold milk when poured into the dish with the cake before topping with freshly sliced berries.There was a little church next to the creek where Dad liked to go fishing that had a Strawberry Festival where we would go every year. Talk about standing in a line! Families would sit at long tables that were heaped with just about every combination of how one could eat strawberries. There was ice cream and shortcake, whipped cream and cold milk.Strawberry season was a treat.When I moved to southern California I was in the heart of year-round strawberry production living between Santa Maria and Oxnard, where many of the country’s strawberries are grown. They were an everyday thing; nothing special anymore.I rode horses with a woman whose family owned large agricultural tracts in Ventura County. The first time I went to her massive strawberry farm I was overwhelmed at the magnitude of the operation. This wasn’t a roadside stand in Gardners. The California strawberries were different, too. The huge #1 Chandlers where the size of my palm, firm and sweet, but lacked the juiciness of the smaller varieties I recalled from my childhood. As we loaded our horses into the trailers after a day of schooling young animals up and down the equipment lanes and irrigation ditches dividing different crops in 20-acre increments there would be flat of strawberries for each of us in the back of our trucks. To have this many all to myself seemed decadent at first, but over the years the novelty wore off.It wasn’t until I returned home that the seasonality of strawberries once again sank in. Grocery store strawberries shipped across the country just didn’t cut it anymore. Accepting this reality, I went back to procuring a flat each year from family who had a public patch and later from fellow vendors at market, some to freeze, some to can and the rest to eat freshly sliced, again discovering that flavor I had so dearly missed. The first berries arrive around Memorial Day and by the Fourth of July they’ve given way to sweet cherries and blueberries.As I moved into the metropolitan markets over an hour south I would always nab a few of the first boxes of the season. At first my dad was perplexed as strawberry season was not set to begin for another month. The realization set in as to the differences in seasons a four-hour drive can make for fresh produce. The early strawberries were still in season, but it was the season in Virginia, not Pennsylvania.While it is not the year-round fresh strawberries of the west, I am grateful for the extended strawberry season that occurs at the markets with multiple growers throughout the region reaching peak season at different times.